It's a combination of Dynasty Warriors hack-'n-slash and real-time strategy. It's a sequel to an even more obscure PC game. It's from a Korean developer nobody has ever heard of. It was released at the busiest time of the year, with little fanfare. With all of this going against it, Kingdom Under Fire: Crusaders turns out to be a sweet little package, for those willing to overlook its quirks.

Crusaders is an odd mix, putting players in the role of both commander and front-line soldier. When units are still jockeying for position, you're a commander, directing your handful of units to advantageous positions in real-time from an overhead-view map. (It's possible, technically, to do the command tasks in the close-in camera following your commander around, but this isn't practical.) There's a rock-paper-scissors RTS-style balance, here; spearmen decimate cavalry, artillery can demolish units as long as they can keep from being engaged, heavy infantry units plow into melee and try to avoid being picked on by specialists, and so on. Anyone who has ever played a real-time strategy title will be familiar with the specialties and the tasks required, but most of the normal RTS busywork of building a base and such isn't in Crusaders.

As soon as your commander's personal unit engages in melee, though, issues of overarching strategy are set aside, as you plow through the teeming masses of enemy troops. You'll be stringing together sword combos as you slice through the grunts and engaging in heated duels with the enemy commander, all very much reminiscent of Dynasty Warriors. All of the characters are reasonably satisfying in a hack-'n-slash kind of way, but Regnier, one of the two unlockable playable characters, is especially fun to play. There's nothing like sending enemies flying Sauron-style as you hack into their ranks.

While the two parts are mildly entertaining on their own, what really sets Crusaders apart is the combination of tense melee combat and large-scale strategy. The later missions will keep tossing hard decisions at you; do you keep control of your commander to try and turn the tide of this one particularly challenging melee, or do you direct your cavalry and spellcasters to help keep the enemy's support units from getting involved? The strategy controls are just a button-press away, even in the thick of the battle, so you'll have to balancing the two gametypes, which can be quite hard.

In fact, sometimes it's just too hard. Crusaders has a handful of insanely difficult missions, to the point where many gamers will become frustrated and just give up. One mission, for example, is almost impossible unless you memorize the location of three ballistae and two unmarked mission checkpoints, else your forces will be destroyed by bombers you can't target and artillery you can't see. Not fun. Each campaign has at least one of these missions, and the campaign that unlocks two of the four playable characters has no less than three.

RPG elements, like levelling up your commanders and units, try to reduce this difficulty, but it's too easy to run into a mission where you absolutely need a specialist unit (like air-to-air wyverns or falcon-riders or anti-cavalry infantry) and have that particular unit too poorly developed to be helpful. With no optional missions or other opportunities to build up lagging units, this kind of frustration is all too common.

These RPG elements do add a great deal of depth, as different units grow and evolve into specialized, visually interesting elites. The Dark Legion, one of the two playable armies, has some especially interesting specialists, with piggish orcs filling the role of cannon fodder, scantily-dressed all-female dark elf units as elite infantry, archers, and cavalry, and truly massive monsters filling shock and artillery roles.

While Crusaders isn't a technical masterpiece, it has a stunning sense of immersion and power. The low, in-the-combat camera makes the pitched battles feel awesome in the old-fashioned sense of the word. There's nothing like seeing a titanic scorpion towering over a legion of heavily-armored orcs and dark elves to inspire awe, unless it's realizing the kind of control you have over the chaos. Having a foot-soldier's perspective adds a sort of personal attachment to your units that few games can match.

While the sense of immersion is a true accomplishment, the character design and animation are lazy and borderline offensive. In the cutscenes, characters seem to be chewing gum instead of moving their mouths along with the dialogue, and in combat, characters often react to being attacked by lurching in random directions for no clear reason. The dark elf character designs are just pathetic, but for a different reason; the all-female dark elf troops are clothed in ridiculously-revealing "armor." Chainmail bikinis are a fantasy staple, granted, but it can pull you out of the experience when your forces look like they just got off shift from their jobs as Las Vegas dancers. This kind of over-the-top excess is a poor fit to Crusaders as a sort of thinking-man's brawler, and do a lot to keep it from being a thinking-person's brawler.

They don't fit with the smart story, either. Crusaders picks up where the previous KUF left off, story-wise, but newcomers probably won't feel terribly lost. There's a broad, heavily political story here, told from a different viewpoint for each of the four playable characters, but it's introduced slowly enough that the complexities never seem overwhelming. The different factions in play are easier to understand and keep track of because they are personalized; for example, instead of a long, boring speech about how the dark elves resent their half-vampire rulers, Lucretia, a dark elf commander, chafes at the limits and orders given to her by Morene, her half-vampire overseer.

The dialogue is just as smart as the story. While it doesn't always fit the setting (Nothing like hearing knights in armor tell each other "You suck!" to pull you out of the experience), each of the characters, both playable and non-playable, is given life through their dialogue. Whether it's Lucretia being confronted with the fact that all is not as it seems, Regnier dealing with the costs of his incredible power (without needless angst, which has to be a first), or Gerald dealing with the sudden responsibility thrust upon him, everyone is believable and refreshingly human.

All this is assuming you turn off the sound outside of combat, or turn it off altogether. The voice acting is uniformly terrible, from fake falsetto dark elf commanders to flat, phoned-in dialogue in the human campaigns. Even the lines that could be memorable are ruined by terrible delivery. The soundtrack is just as grating; generic hair-metal guitar solos and throwaway synth lines will leave you wishing Phantagram had included some way to use custom soundtracks from the Xbox's hard drive.

Kingdom Under Fire: Crusaders isn't much like anything else out there, as the combination of brawling and RTS is used to give it a sense of scale few games can offer. Some gamers will be turned off by the utterly embarrassing audio production or the uneven difficulty, but those willing to stick out the challenge and mute the sound will find story and depth to go along with the scale and immersion. Just get it now; this has all the earmarks of a cult classic.